Let Me Count the Ways
by Marissalyn
Summary: Carmilla compares her relationship with Laura to hers with Ell.


"Tell me if I'm wrong

Tell me if I'm right

Tell me if you need a loving hand

To help you fall asleep tonight."

-'Cold Coffee' by Ed Sheeran

XXX

They both snore, and you know that everyone snores depending on how tired they are, but sometimes you think that Ell had broken her nose at a young age, and well, Laura's just a heavy breather. It's like her nose just stops working once she starts her circadian rhythms. But you think it's cute, even if it keeps you up until daybreak on the worst nights.

They both had learned how to pout in just the right way to get you to do whatever they asked. They both had learned that you had kept two fingers unbroken so that they could wrap themselves around them.

Neither of them knew with full certainty of the war that waged inside you, what flashed behind shut eyelids, what exactly made you flinch from the loudness of the unexpected; neither of them knew why you bite a hole through your cheek when it all begins to become too much and the anxiety begins to sink in.

Laura thought it was the coffin; seventy years of immobility and choking on the poisoned blood of a past lover.

Ell had believed it to be your father; a strong and wise man turned a harsh and biting drunk.

You guessed it to be a little bit of both, but you knew it was also due to your fear of losing them. Your hands were too brittle, too scarred. Covered with the blood of many, the grit of the dirt beneath your feet. The foundation to your very being could only tarnish what was polished. Neither would have believed you.

Ell would have given you every reason to leave.

Laura would give you every reason to stay.

Neither understood the consequences of either.

You soon learned with the upmost relief that they had more differences than similarities.

Laura bit her nails, while Ell had someone file them. Laura spoke fluently in English just as well as Ell spoke French. Laura's hair was longer, her hands calloused from life experience and krav maga. She wound up with cookie crumbs in her sheets, on her lips, and between the keys of her keyboard. Her hair smelled of strawberries and not lavender.

Laura was everything you had believed to detest until she was just there. You believe Laura was thrown into your life, while Ell had been placed strategically by mother and the great beyond. You soon learned that Laura was meant to make you forget, and slowly, day by day, you were finally forgetting parts of Ell you now think you just might have made up to help soothe your burns, as you licked your wounds, imagining your tongue to be a paintbrush that you had used to paint a black and white canvas a kaleidoscope of colors.

Laura was the sun, forever burning a hole through your chest and scalding to touch.

Ell was the moon, hollowed and haunting, glowing against a backdrop of pitch black.

You were the stars in between, forever in place, but only noticeable half of the time. You liked it that way.

With Laura your fingers didn't fit together, lacing perfectly like Ell's and yours had. Instead your knuckles bumped against one another, but you found it endearing because things didn't just fall together for you two, and you were beginning to think that it was better that way. If you looked at the glass half empty, you're not nearly as disappointed if it tips over.

That's another thing Ell and Laura had in common. They both had always looked at the glass half full, and you supposed that it all came with the territory of being achingly human and so young, the world had yet to crumble beneath their feet. Loved ones had yet to betray them. Their dreams and aspirations had yet to die.

You were glad to have been with both of them. They had taught you things that you yourself had never dreamed possible. They had each shown you something within yourself to love rather than hate, and you couldn't be more grateful.

Ell had proven to you that there was a side to you that was chivalrous and kind, delicate and gentle. You think it may have to do with how much of a newborn vampire you were. If that were to happen to you now, you aren't so sure you would have been so easy to convince. When Ell died, mother had made sure to strip you of every belief of ever being good by burying you.

Laura is still teaching you things. Things that you are now more hesitant to believe. She is different from Ell in the ways that she loves you. She doesn't tell you that there is still good in you, she assumes that you already know that. She doesn't tell you to be gentle or careful when touching her, she doesn't ask you to love her in the way she wants you to. She wants you to love her in the only way you know how. She's patient, and she knows that you are trying to be better, but she isn't turning you away because you can't change everything at once.

You loved Ell, you still do, but there was a point in the past year that you had learned the difference between love and loved. No matter how many times you had gone to the library since you had awoken from the ground, you were never able to find the answers that looking into Laura's eyes gave you.

Loving Ell had inevitably hurt you, and it had been worth it at the time. So much so that you died for her, well as close to death you could get without actually dying. It had been worse than death. She had turned on you. She didn't love all of you, just the parts that you had painted and tied a bow around before presenting them to her. She was a spoiled child of the nineteenth century and you couldn't hate her for it. No matter how much you wanted to push her out of your thoughts, to stop your heart from aching for her, it was of no use.

You guessed you had gotten over her before you met Laura, but just wanted to hold onto something that had once made you forget your monstrous ways so you stuck to the belief of being in love with a dead girl. It was all that you had thought that you deserved. It was the only thing you were going to allow yourself. You weren't going to make the mistake of letting your heart overcome your head again. And then Laura showed up on your radar and it started all over again. You couldn't have stopped yourself if you had wanted to.

Laura was different from Ell. They had similarities, sometimes if you closed your eyes and touched your fingertips to the base of her spine you could imagine it to be Ell. They were both human, had fluttering heartbeats that you had full control of. If you pressed your lips between Laura's shoulder blades you could remember a time where you had memorized every inch of Ell's body in her family's garden on a Sunday where her father had left for the day.

The one thing you couldn't do though was look at Laura and want to think of Ell. When you were with Laura that was all you wanted. To love her, to kiss her, to commit everything about her to your memory, maybe even overwrite Ell's everything with hers.

You knew you wouldn't regret it this time because Laura loved you in every way that Ell couldn't, and that was the real difference, and the only one that mattered.

So when you thought about it, Laura and Ell weren't that much alike, and you didn't want them to be. They were a part of different chapters in your eternal life, and if Ell was your prologue, you wanted Laura to be your epilogue.

There was a shift in the bed as you dipped slightly into the mattress.

"Hey, what are you doing awake?" Laura asked, sleep still thick in her voice, her eyes bleary, and her hair a tangled mess.

You shrugged, smiling. "You just snore really loud."

Laura rolled her eyes, resettling her head into your chest, wrapping an arm around your waist, and pressing a kiss into the fabric of your shirt. "Go to sleep, I'll try not to snore as loud."

You smile, she couldn't stop if she wanted to, and you wouldn't want her to stop. At this point you took it as a comfort, to know that she was safe and asleep in bed; alive. You closed your eyes and decided that sleep was a good idea. You had stared at the wall long enough, thought about Ell long enough. In sleep you knew you would not dream, because Laura was holding you as much as you were holding her, and you knew that there wasn't a better way to sleep like the dead.


End file.
